Abstract
Conservation of a patient's natural teeth remains an important outcome in securing oral health. Endodontic treatments have been shown to successfully retain compromised teeth which are fractured, carious or traumatised. Outcomes of dental treatments as explained in the literature fall into four categories: success, survival with intervention, survival without intervention and failure. The success or failure in endodontic therapy is still problematic for the clinician. Improper mechanical debridement, persistence of bacteria in the canals and apex, poor obturation quality, over and under extension of the root canal obturating material, and coronal leakage are some of the commonly associated causes of failure. Despite the high success rate of endodontic treatment, failures do occur in a greater number of cases and most of the times can be attributed to the already stated causes. With an ever-increasing number of endodontic treatments being done each day, it has become difficult to avoid or minimize the most fundamental of reasons prominent to endodontic failure. A total of 1096 cases have been selected for the study with parameters like single visit root canal treatment, multi visit root canal treatment, and extractions. Data was collected from reviewing patient records and analysed the data between June 2019 and March 2020. In this study, we observed that root canal therapy has a success rate of 97.9% (1073 teeth) and 2.7% (23 teeth) failure in mandibular first molars ( > 0.05). Within the limitations of the study, root canal therapy has a higher success rate but one cannot totally rely on one single factor that will decide the success of a treatment. More research is required with enhanced study designs before long term success rates can be correlated.

Key words: Endodontic success, failure rate, root canal therapy, mandibular molars, success rate